A Glancing Light

buildings don't have garages.'

'Why not leave the cars out on the street?'

Ugo grumbled something unintelligible, and pressed the accelerator even farther down. My question hadn't pleased him.

'You can't leave a car out all night in Catania,' Mary said. 'At least not around here. It's not such a great idea in our neighborhood, either. The car might still be there in the morning, but forget about hubcaps and mirrors. Ugo, do you remember what happened to Silvia?' She turned to look at me over her shoulder. 'I have a cousin who parked one of those little cars in front of a restaurant and went in to eat. Five big men came along, picked it up, and simply ran off with it. She actually saw them do it, but she couldn't catch them.'

Ugo pouted. 'Any big city has a little crime. New York is worse.' Down went his foot on the accelerator.

I resolved to ask no more questions about curious native customs.

There is no quick way through or around Catania. One must wind through the heart of the city to get to the other side. This we did, and after a while the dismal streets broadened into clean, pleasant avenues, and the neighborhoods took on an affluent sheen. We stopped for a few minutes near the Via Etnea, a posh commercial street that might have been in Rome or Paris, so I could buy some socks and underwear. The ones I'd started out with were being held in Bologna along with my duffel bag as material evidence. These purchases naturally required some explanation. Ugo and Mary were shocked, of course, and insisted on going over the same ground I'd covered with Antuono a few hours before. To equally little avail.

A few miles north of the city we finally pulled into a seaside neighborhood of handsome villas and small apartment buildings, and parked in an unpaved alley bordered on both sides by eight-foot stucco walls topped with broken glass.

'We'll leave the car here,' Ugo said. 'We're going out for dinner later. '

Half a dozen boys of nine or ten trotted up. Cigarettes dangled from several of the small mouths. Ugo gave one of the smokers, a hot-eyed kid wearing a torn Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt, a 1,000-lire note.

'Protection money,' Mary told me. 'They watch the car. The Mafiosi begin early here.'

Ugo scowled at her. 'Very funny,' he muttered. 'See, I'm laughing. I'm going inside to get the pictures ready for Cristoforo.'

He unlocked a tall, spiked gate in one of the walls and stalked down a path through a sparsely planted rock garden toward the house, a modern, boxlike three-story structure painted pale blue.

'Oh-oh, now I've made him mad,' Mary said with no sign of repentance. 'I'll have to be good for the rest of the day.' As usual, when Ugo wasn't there, she spoke English to me.

She closed the gate behind us and shook it to make sure it was locked. As we followed a few yards behind Ugo a startlingly large bulldog gallumphed out from behind a corner of the house and made fearsomely for her, spittle drooling from its dewlaps and lovelight shining in its eyes.

'Hello, Adamo, how are you, dog?' she said, tugging hard on both its ears and accepting with apparent enjoyment a slobbering show of affection. 'Say hello to Christopher.'

I gingerly patted the monstrous head and tried without success to avoid the frantic wet-mop of a tongue. 'More protection?' I asked.

Ugo, who had paused a few feet ahead of us, made the connection to 'protezione' and answered in Italian. 'Yes,' he allowed, 'there's some theft around here.'

'Some theft?' Mary echoed. 'You have to nail everything down if you want to keep it.' To me she said: 'We've been lucky, but twice last year they robbed the neighbors across the way.'

Ugo, never one to stay in a snit for very long, burst out laughing. 'After the first one,' he told me, 'they got a watchdog, a big expensive Doberman. They thought that would take care of the problem. So what happened? Well, the next time the crooks came, along with everything else they stole the dog.'

Adamo, who had calmed down enough to notice Ugo, waddled amiably over to him. Ugo knelt, grasped its flaccid chops, and fondly rocked the big head from side to side. 'But nobody would steal you, would they? You're too ugly to steal, aren't you?' The dog grinned and wagged its stump of a tail.

Mary put one hand in the crook of Ugo's elbow and one in mine. 'Come on, let's go in. Chris has had quite a day. I'm sure he'd like to relax and have a drink.'

True enough, but I didn't get much time to relax. Their housekeeper had barely set down three glasses of a sweet, musky marsala, and Mary had just begun to ask polite questions about the show, when Ugo started fidgeting. He crossed his right leg over his left. He reversed them. He uncrossed them and tapped his toes restlessly against the tiled floor. He pulled up his shirt cuff to look with ostentatious anxiety at his watch. He sighed.

'Is something bothering you, love?' Mary asked. 'You have an itch in an indiscreet place, perhaps? Would you like to be excused?'

'No, no. It's just the time. It's after four o'clock, and the light won't be good much longer. I want Cristoforo to see the paintings before it goes.'

'Of course. I'd like that.' Not that I thought for a minute that it had anything to do with the light. Ugo was like a big kid; he just couldn't wait any longer to show off his picture gallery. And I was happy to oblige; I'd rather look at old paintings than drink wine anyway. Especially when I know the wine will still be there when I come back. I put my glass down on a marble-topped sidetable. I'd been flattered to see that Ugo felt comfortable enough with me to serve the marsala in big, square tumblers instead of the stemmed wine glasses he found too dainty for his yeoman's hands.

Mary stood up. 'I'll leave the two of you to it, then. Don't forget about the time up there, We have early dinner reservations: eight o'clock.'

Ugo sprang out of his chair, grabbed the bottle by the neck, and tucked it under an arm. 'Bring your glass,' he told me. 'We'll have a toast.'

I complied. Looking at old paintings while drinking wine was even better.

I assumed we were going to spend a leisurely hour or two in his top-floor gallery, but instead he led me on a double-time tramp through it, allowing only hurried pauses in front of the four paintings he was lending us for the exhibit, and another stop before the Boursse he would be selling to the museum.

The little Boursse was as exquisite as I remembered it, a meticulously executed interior scene along the lines of his Woman Cooking in London's Wallace Collection. But this one was even more intimately domestic: A Mother Ridding Her Child's Hair of Lice—not a hugely appealing subject to today's art lover, but in seventeenth-century Holland a frequently used image of maternal love and a homely metaphor for good government. Sipping the fragrant wine, I looked at it lovingly no longer covetously), but I could hear Ugo behind me, shifting impatiently from foot to foot, could feel him psychologically yanking at me.

I turned away from the picture. 'Ugo, are we in some kind of hurry?'

'No, no. Well, yes. Don't you want to see my surprise?'

 'Surprise?'

His face fell. 'You don't remember?'

I did, dimly. 'In Bologna, at that bar. You said something about a surprise. . . .'

'Yes, come!' Now he was physically yanking me. 'You can look at your Boursse some more later.' We bypassed the elevator (too slow?) and started down the steps. 'Do you remember,' he said with a nervous laugh, 'you once told me there was somebody missing from your show?'

'Uytewael,' I replied.

More properly Wtewael, Joachim, made fractionally more accessible to the nonspeaker of Dutch by its alternate spelling. Uytewael was another painter of the Utrecht School, one of its leaders in his day, but little-known now. He was a legitimate part of Northerners in Italy, having spent two formative years in Padua when he was in his twenties. Originally, a single rare Uytewael had been included in the loan we were getting from the Pinacoteca, but the picture had proved too fragile to travel, so the show was without one. Or had been until now.

I stopped him on the stairs and stared at him. 'You haven't gone out and bought an Uytewael, have you?'

He grinned again and tugged at me to move along.

I held him back. 'You're going to lend it to the show? That's great, Ugo! But where—'

He put a fist on each hip. 'Hey, Cristoforo, you want to talk about it, or you want to see it?'